Network Communications News (NCN) September 2016 | Page 17

Tris Simmons of Netgear

Q&A

Geared for success
This month NCN talks to Netgear’s director of product marketing Tris Simmons and
gets his thoughts on network resilience, the IoT, wireless connectivity and more.
What industry sectors
are Netgear focused
on right now?
The breadth of the Netgear portfolio
means we cover all manner of verticals
with different horizontal technologies.
Netgear appeals to consumers,
right through to small and mid-sized
organisations, as well as global service
providers through our three business
units of consumer, commercial and
service providers.

How did you get
involved in the IT
infrastructure industry?
I started working with mobile phones
when I joined the Ericsson graduate
trainee programme back in 1995, back
when adoption forecasts were for
two million mobile phones in the UK
by 2000, which clearly got thrashed.
From there I continued to develop a
taste for technology that has seen me
move across to UNIX/NT computing,
through to satellite Internet, VoIP
platforms, broadband, switching and
wireless technologies.

What industry trends do
you expect to see emerge
over the next few years?
IoT will be developed by the large
enterprise space and enabled by the
SMB and consumer markets as it ripples
through the supply chain. Opportunity
to hook up sensors that connect to the
Internet will grow and a more integrated
society will arise. For example, more
and more application types are climbing
on the IP network than ever before,
from voice to data, video, surveillance
cameras, through to the rapid rise of
access points servicing Wi-Fi connectivity
needs. Door controllers powered by
PoE are already in use as well and in
time wider adoption of lighting systems
powered and managed over the IP
switched network will also arise.

What are the differences
between unmanaged,
fully managed and smart
managed switches?
Innovation has changed the traditional
line-up. I can identify eight different
switch categories in our own portfolio,
with each one offering a step up to a
better network experience. Ultimately,
the differences really boil down to
two types of switches, managed and
unmanaged.
Unmanaged is a pure plug and play,
with zero management interaction at all.
The second type is a managed platform
that supports configuration to set up

multiple parameters either through
an intuitive web GUI or a command
line interface (CLI) to hard code your
network. Across both types you will then
have a choice of different form factors,
levels of management, security, and
access privileges. Sometimes you see
reference to web and smart managed,
which will leave you wondering what
the difference really is. They both use a
web GUI as the primary interface, but
a smart switch will bring more security
settings, bigger table sizes, automated
VLANs (not manual) and static routing,
which appeals to medium sized
business where more granular network
control is needed.
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